Nicolas Cage is set to play Nicolas Cage in a satire about Niccolas Cage.
Since 2006, when the world bore witness to ‘Not the bees!’, the wild and wacky actor has mainly starred in low-budget, outside efforts: from Kick-Ass and Drive Angry to Mandy and Colour out of Space.
However, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is set to be his most meta project to date, with the National Treasure playing himself.
Lionsgate beat out other distributors – such as HBO Max and Paramount – for the film, which has a script by Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten, with Gormican attached to direct, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
All things going well with contracts, Cage would play a fictionalised version of himself who’s ‘desperate to get a role in a new Quentin Tarantino movie while also dealing with a strained relationship with his teenage daughter’.
Throughout the film, he’d also talk to an ‘egotistical 1990s version of himself who rides him for making too many crappy movies and for not being a star anymore’.
The film would then go in even more bizarre directions:
The Cage character is also under a mountain of debt and finds himself forced to make an appearance at the birthday party of a Mexican billionaire who happens to be a fan of Cage’s work and secretly hopes to show him a script on which he’s been working.
While he bonds with the man, Cage is informed by the CIA that the billionaire is actually a drug cartel kingpin who has kidnapped the daughter of a Mexican presidential nominee and is recruited by the US government to get intelligence.
The situation spirals even more dramatically when the Mexican brings over Cage’s daughter and his ex-wife for a reconciliation, and when their lives are on the line, Cage takes on the role of a lifetime.
There’s a whole lot to digest there. It almost feels in the same spirit as Danny Trejo’s cult-favourite Machete, and is set to have nods to Cage’s Leaving Las Vegas, Face-Off and Gone in 60 Seconds.
There’s also shades of Adaptation, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s meta JCVD, and John Travolta’s showbiz comedy Get Shorty.
Cage reportedly received a letter from Gormican outlining why the project was a love letter to the actor’s legacy, rather than a mocking exercise. Cage allegedly loved it, and could even earn a paycheck as high as his Con Air days.
Kevin Turen, who produced upcoming A24 drama Waves and worked on HBO’s Euphoria, will also reportedly produce with Cage and his Saturn Films banner along with Mike Nilon.
There is no speculated release date for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.